Brilliant, edgy historical fiction that catches the jittery, violent flux of the French Revolution." Michael Upchurch, Chicago Tribune
Paris, 1789: there are breadlines everywhere, armed beggars on the streets, minor riots most days. On the Left Bank, an obscure but ambitious young lawyer is clawing out a living. Georges-Jacques Danton is energetic, pragmatic, debt-riddenand hugely but erotically ugly. He intends to make his mark, and he doesn't mind how.
Maximilien Robespierre is also a lawyer. He is slight, meek, diligentand terrified of violence. He wishes only to do good.
Robespierre's dearest friend is a young man of no fixed address. A charming gadfly, erratic and untrustworthy, bisexual and beautiful, Camille Desmoulins is obsessed by one woman and engaged to marry another, her daughter. An inveterate conspirator and a pamphleteer of genius, he soon finds he has a deft way with a crowd.
A Place of Greater Safety tells the story of the Revolution through the lives of three men who formed their friendships in youth under the ancien regime, became players during the last days of Louis XVI and his corrupt court, led the mob in the first exhilarating moments of the upheaval, and died, none older than thirty-six, by the hand of the very forces they had brought into being. It is a stunning work of the imagination, one that reveals truths even the best historical accounts cannot match.